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Comment by AlbertCory | Hacker News Reader

I nearly went to IBM. Fortunately I didn't. Their program for plant visits was the best of any of the companies I interviewed with: at the end of the day, they asked me to estimate all my expenses, and then they handed me an envelope of cash.

Another legacy company book HN'ers would really like for a Christmas gift is "Bill & Dave"

https://www.amazon.com/Bill-Dave-Hewlett-Packard-Greatest/dp...

the author is an unabashed fanboy, and the history ends with Mark Hurd before he imploded. Still, it's a great history of a (formerly) great company.

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There is a very good argument that the real inheritor of the HP DNA is Keysight.

I've said this before, but it's a shame that the HP brand didn't end up with Agilent/Keysight. What was once a well respected name has been destroyed over the last 25 years, and is now synonymous with terrible printers and computers.

Yes. I even did some market cap comparisons between Agilent / Keysight (and there are other spinoffs and semi-spinoffs) and HPE. HPE loses.

The real villain, which you won't get from the press but the book tells you, is Richard Hackborn. He was offered the job before Fiorina, and turned it down.

https://archive.ph/5ijLo

https://www.nndb.com/people/181/000124806/

Hackborn was the genius behind their laser printer business. He hated HQ and stayed in Boise, which is probably why he didn't want the top job. But he was Fiorina's champion all the way through the Compaq merger debacle.

Interesting, I'll have to get a copy of that book. It goes to show how difficult succession planning and keeping a culture is, once the founders retire or leave.

I'm reminded of the "HP Origins" video from 2006. There's a clip of Bill Hewlett towards the end, talking about the HP Way:

> "We hope that the people that'll follow us will have the same ideas...I don't think that a lot of these fundamental positions are going to change very much; they're too ingrained in the organisation." [0]

Sadly, this didn't come to pass.

[0] https://youtu.be/Iqv6DhtLay4?t=1327

Funny, my knowledge of HP (three separate visits) came from the John Young / Lew Platt eras. I thought they were already getting stodgy and mediocre, although the folks were just great to work with. No big egos at all. It was a nice company.

Walter Hewlett and David Packard, Jr. really should have been groomed to take over. No skin in the game like having your name on the company.

how did Mark Hurd implode? I've never heard this before

A lot of his success was increasingly viewed as financial engineering that included things like really cutting back on research. He was eventually forced out over some expense picadillos that were presumably cover for the fact that the board just didn't want him there any more. (Or there may have been been other issues that AFAIK never came fully to light.)

I'm pretty sure the reason for Mark Hurd's exit was for something quite different. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/12/all-dir...

I wasn't paying much attention to HP by then as I had moved companies and roles. As I recall, everyone strongly suspected this kind of thing because the public reason for his departure at the time didn't really pass the sniff test. There was also a lot of boardroom and executive drama at HP before, during, and after Hurd's time there.

The only reason I remembered was because I was a big fan of Palm WebOS and when HP bought it, there was a brief moment where I thought, "Wow HP is really going to have a go at this and try to become like the old HP." Then Hurd left and the new guy (former SAP exec I think?) axed the whole thing. What an absolute waste all that was. I felt like if RIM or Nokia had acquired Palm it would have had a reasonable shot.

>former SAP exec I think?)

Yep, Leo Apotheker. Who also presided over the Autonomy mess.

I was an industry analyst until 2010 and HP servers and storage were pretty big clients. (I also know one of the journalists well who got their phone records accessed.) I was still in the industry after but not following HP day-to-day. I either missed Kara's later reporting or had just forgotten given that people were assuming something along those lines.

After reading about many failing companies IBM, HP, GE etc, I am becoming unsure if Financial engineering led to failures later on or they were already failing and just resorted to financial engineering to cover up.

Regarding Mark Hurd, there was that funny story that his replacement Leo Apotheker burned 11 billion dollars on Autonomy purchase and HP had to write off ~9 billions in a year or two. Mark was at Oracle and refused to buy Autonomy at 6 billion dollars few months earlier.

Sorry for the tangent but I have to know if it’s really “picadillos” you meant to type.

Yes, he was forced out in a bitter dispute, almost a riot, about serving these in the HP cafeteria. At least that's what I heard. They took their food very seriously there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picadillo

That's weird. He was very famously fired for sexual misconduct, which is why Larry Ellison hired him to Oracle.

Larry Ellison is also famous for his "can I buy you a car?" line for attractive women. ;)

I think the pun may have been lost on you.

Definitely.

This is of course, distinct from Picadilly's cafeteria chain.

No. And I could have sworn I even looked up the spelling for what I meant to type.

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